Infinity's Illusion Page 10

  As he passed under the stern, taking one last look at the rudder, he overheard Lorna talking to Kit and Morag in a quiet voice. His memories from first meeting Kit, and first being attracted to her, were bright in his mind now, like newly uncovered coins at an archaeological dig, but there was no emotion attached to them. Not even embarrassment: his only emotions on the subject of Kit were the desire that she and Morag get the chance to be together, and experience ordinary life together—and frustration that he couldn’t see, or feel, or intuit whether that was going to happen.

  Lorna’s voice was low, almost gravelly, and the only word he could pick out was gangrene. Not wanting to think about that, he tried to picture them on the open ocean again. When he did, what came to him instead was the image of Hideo Murakami in his rose garden. He decided to believe that meant they would make it.

  “What are you thinking about, Daniel?”

  He’d nearly walked right into Hope, who was waiting for him near the bow. Along with a flirty expression, she handed him a paintbrush and an open can of red paint.

  “We should rename her, don’t you think? For her final journey. What do you say, Daniel?”

  “Hope is a good name,” he said, avoiding her eyes and twirling ribbons of paint off the end of the brush.

  Just then, Morag came forward and looked down at them over the railing. “Hope is good,” she said. “But Tomás is right. It sounds better in Spanish. Esperanza.”

  The next morning Tomás was cooler, and claimed to be feeling better. They got him below deck and strapped him to a bunk. With the tide almost at its highest, the four women hung on to a line that ran from the stern through a block and tackle and around a large rock on the beach. “Wait,” Daniel said, moving back and forth along the rail; then he took his position at a winch handle next to the mast. He watched the water as it sloshed against the sides. “Wait. OK, now.”

  He crouched down at the winch handle and worked at a sprint, with all his strength, counting the turns. If the bow would shift just a few points to the north as the deck came up level—

  Instead, after what seemed like an eternity of nothing, the hull tilted over by another ten degrees and jammed. They all slipped toward the deck edge, where the only foothold was a narrow sill under the railing. At just that moment a wave came in, ran along the tilted deck, and surged up to their knees. Lorna lost her balance and tumbled into the water. “Mumma!” Morag shouted, and then she tripped as she reached out and went in too. Daniel caught sight of something dark approaching the hull on the same side, just under the surface. His heart missed a beat. Lorna hadn’t seen it, and Morag hadn’t even surfaced. Then she did, spluttering, and managed to grab the rail.

  “Water. Why always water? Get me out of here. I hate the bloody stuff.”

  Daniel was about to shout a warning and dive in when the dark object surfaced. It was the dead goat—or else, more likely, it was a different dead goat. Morag had managed to grab the rail, and Kit was with her. The water was carrying Lorna away from the boat. Then it swirled and brought her back to the half-submerged rail, close to where Daniel was hanging on. At the risk of falling in himself, he was able to lean out, grab her, and help her clamber back on board.

  A second, larger wave was right behind the first. Hope had had to abandon the line in order to hang on; the wave washed halfway up the deck, almost to the mast, and threatened to sweep all of them in. But instead, with an ominous grinding noise, the hull lifted clear and began to right itself.

  “This is it,” Daniel shouted, clambering through a foot of foam. “Come on. Now. We won’t get another chance.”

  He pulled on the line until his hands bled. Kit was there too, her thin arm muscles as taut as strings, and the others a moment later. Slowly, creaking and reluctant, the whole boat turned a few degrees as the wave retreated. The fiberglass hull rasped and skidded, moving reluctantly against the sharp ridges of concrete. Again, it stopped. Daniel opened his mouth to bellow out his frustration, but with a lurch it moved again, and stopped, and moved again, and with the last of the retreating wave it was carried off the rubble into a channel of just-barely-deep-enough water.

  Daniel hoisted the mainsail, only to have the first puff of wind almost drive them onto the submerged remains of a jetty. But with one more ugly grinding noise they got clear, and soon they were moving safely forward among clumps of tide-borne debris. In no time they’d caught more air, and they came north around the headland at Vanimo, passing directly into one of Daniel’s most horribly vivid dreams.

  “Feck,” Lorna said. “Poor buggers.”

  “The wave must have dragged all of them this way,” Morag whispered.

  “Yah,” Kit said. “Or current and wind maybe is trap them here. Explain why we not see so many bodies previous. Horrible.”

  They were passing through a field of floating corpses. Three hundred? Five hundred? Men, women, and children, jostling for space. They reminded Daniel of logs. They reminded him of Spirit Lake, at Mount St. Helens, still choked with huge bare tree trunks decades after the eruption.

  As they watched, and tried not to watch, one of the bodies rolled over, bluish-gray and horribly bloated, with a stump of an arm turning. But it wasn’t a body, or the stump of an arm. It was the fat, sleek side of an overfed shark.

  Twenty minutes later, with a sigh of relief, they’d left the bodies and New Guinea behind them. They were sailing west of north, into the clean open ocean, with a good breeze in their favor. Morag was turning the color of lime juice. Daniel made her put on Esperanza’s one remaining life jacket.

  “We’ll be crossing the equator soon,” he said.

  “‘Crossin’ the line,’ as they used te say,” Lorna replied. But she was looking south, not north—back toward the receding coast, and the mountains where Jimmy lay. Her eyes glistened. “Aye, we’re on our way, an’ thass good, in’t it? I jes’ hope yer right about this bloke in Kyoto.”

  Kit held up a big brown can of baked beans. “For celebrate, I open, yah?”

  “How many cans do we have?” Lorna asked.

  “Two more after this. Is OK with you, Hope?”

  Hope finished peeling a long strip of dead skin from her shoulder, and nodded vacantly. They ate the beans. To really make it into a feast, they passed around the one remaining can of warm Australian lager.

  For twenty-four hours after that—apart from the beginning pangs of hunger, and a light swell that made Morag violently seasick—everything went well.

  PART II: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  CHAPTER 7

  A SHORT HISTORY OF ALMOST (BUT NOT QUITE) EVERYTHING

  “Big bang.” That’s what they told you, isn’t it? The mother of all noises, combined with a flash of light as all-encompassing as the will of God.

  But that primordial seed, which contains all the galaxies, and all time—including you, and Daniel and Morag, and this exact now of your reading—is smaller than you can possibly imagine. And it cracks open in perfect silence, not merely because space is a vacuum, in which sound can’t travel, but because the mathematics tells us that as yet there is no space, no vacuum even, not yet so much as nothing. Space does not surround the seed. Space itself is what unfurls from the seed, the petals of an April tulip made of the deepest, most velvet, most absolute darkness. No light at all, you see! The budding universe is too hot for atoms to form, and is filled instead with a fog of free protons and electrons. It’s a plasma so dense that the photons, the bringers of light, can’t move around.

  Let’s hope you bought the extra-large bag of popcorn, because you’re going to have to wait a long time before the curtain goes up on the show you’ve paid to see. The relentless doubling and doubling and doubling of space is diluting all that energy, but it takes 370,000 years before Creation’s infant fever comes down below three thousand degrees. Only then does each proton find enough strength to wrap its positively charged arms around an electron. Only then is matter, as we understand it, created. That’s when God says Go.
That moment of recombination, as the cosmologists call it, is when light, imprisoned from birth, is freed for the first time, and streams out joyfully in all directions, fretting the heavens with golden fire.

  You’re only human, so you may prefer to think of the original seed as perfect—humans have a long, disastrous love affair with the idea of perfection. But a perfectly uniform universe, like a perfectly organized society or a perfectly logical language, is a dead one. Luckily for us, even at the beginning of our universe there are quantum fluctuations—an almost infinitely subtle graininess, with individual lumps as small relative to an atom as an atom is to the solar system, and those lumps inflate monstrously, as it is written in the equations. From infinitesimal beginnings, they grow to structure the universe: the positive densities become galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, while the negative ones become the unimaginable gulfs between. Within the individual galaxies, smaller voids form, called interstellar space, peppered with the hot dense pinpricks of hydrogen fusion that we call stars.

  Wait now. Eat more popcorn.

  These first stars are childless: they have no planets. But some of them are huge, and the stellar rule is that the large live fast. After only a few tens or hundreds of millions of years, a billion at the outside, these early giants exhaust their fuel, cooking heavier and heavier elements as they become unstable. Finally they collapse under their own gravity, and explode, and their spectacular death throes cast their remains into the surrounding space. Disks of rubble and dust form around some of the remaining or newer stars. The first planets begin to assemble themselves.

  Oh, how Nature loves excess! She forms more of these planets than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth; more than there are drops of water in all the oceans; more than there are flames on the surface of the sun. For most of human history, we’ve known just six of them: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. We increased that to seven (Uranus, 1781), and then eight (Neptune, 1846). A big deal, once. But today? A decent guess, now that the Slipher Space Telescope has completed its full survey, might be two to four planets per star, on average. So we’ve gone from eight of them, all orbiting Sol, to perhaps five hundred billion in the Milky Way alone, and a hundred billion trillion in the whole sky. The totals scarcely matter anymore: what we know is that planets in our universe are like particles of dust in some old library that the Seraphim have not yet burned: they are everywhere.

  While a fresh-baked planet is still molten, only basic chemistry can happen. But when the steam finally turns to liquid, a small fraction of these planets bear witness to the miracle in which lowly chemistry fulfills its highest, wildest, most go-for-broke entrepreneurial dream. Small molecules become larger; some of these larger molecules become much larger; some of those learn, by trial and nearly endless error, the trick of self-replication. Chemistry becomes biology—and soon, soon (another billion years?), the self-replicating molecules have clothed their virgin planet in a tattered shawl, a modest covering, knitted from single-celled organisms like the ones we call bacteria.

  You might think evolution would take off at that point, yes? Plants, then insects! Fish, then frogs! Monkeys, then novelists! But our own example suggests things are not so easy. The bacteria are an enthusiastic bunch, no question, infesting and ingesting and parasitizing each other in every possible way. New forms take shape by the thousand, and they invade every nook, no matter how unlikely. But nothing else happens. On almost every one of these shawled and living planets, nothing else ever, ever happens.

  It’s only on a minuscule portion that another miracle’s in store. After the long era of slime, another clever trick of cooperation is chanced upon. Perhaps, as with us, one tribe of bacteria parasitizes another, inventing a symbiotic relationship in which a brilliant and hugely profitable new game called photosynthesis can be played. In this way, or some other, the multicellular path is born. Groups of cells cooperate, and specialize, and specialize more. Biology becomes zoology.

  We’re down to how many planets, now? Shall we say, for the sake of argument, a trillionth of the original total? These outliers, these statistical ultra-freaks, are all populated with life-forms that a human zoologist would recognize (after the first shock of revulsion or delight has worn off) as animals. They mate. They eat. Over time, if they survive, they change in subtle ways, becoming better at fundamental skills such as killing, and running away, and not being noticed. So what, if some of them are a millimeter tall, a kilometer wide, and a hundred kilometers long? So what, if some of them are armies of clones that live permanently attached to one another on the lightless floors of methane seas? So what, if some of them have seven sexes, “see” only in the microwave range, and live out their lives on the extreme edge of space, held aloft by stadium-sized bladders of helium? The point is: on each of these planets, in some unique way, Charles Darwin’s dance party is in full swing. Shine your shoes! Life, relentlessly energetic life, is busy checking out every possible move, twirling through every possible sequence of moves, ruthlessly discarding whatever trick’s not good enough for getting the essentials: one, a dance partner; two, a gene-sharing arrangement, otherwise known as sex; and three, those convenient packages for delivering genes into the future, known to the zoologists as offspring.

  You’ve already guessed the next miracle. On an equally tiny fraction of these rare animated planets, special animals come into being. Oh, they don’t look like anything special: before their time comes, you wouldn’t pick them out, wouldn’t guess there’s something big in store for them. They’ve come to where they are through the usual evolutionary ranks, doing their reproductive thing without being aware of themselves. But there’s a point at which these special animals find a strange thing happening. Deep within them, in a dark, unnameable place, the stream of raw experience—of pain and hunger, of fear and pleasure and rest—is beginning to clot, like blood. Experiencing is beginning to solidify, take on shape, and identify itself.

  Causing telltale wrinkles in the Murakami Field.

  So vanishingly rare, this event! And yet the universe is so vast, so absurdly profligate, like a rich man in his limousine spewing cash out of the rear window to the scrabbling masses, that we are still talking about more planets, and more species, than there are moments in an old person’s lifetime. And each of these species has (or had, for some of them existed, flourished, and then ceased to exist long before the Earth was even formed) the kind of higher consciousness that brings the self into being.

  The self—or the soul, as we have sometimes called it. The thing that makes it possible for us to experience time passing. And therefore makes it possible for us to fear death. And therefore makes necessary our invention—

  (or our discovery—which is it, do you think?)

  —of gods.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

  Here’s something strange about these accidents of self-awareness, these sparse glitterings of consciousness, which lie scattered across the universe like bright grains of salt in the Sahara, each one a thousand stars distant from the next. An astonishing pair of coincidences, you might be tempted to say, if you find the idea of coincidence comforting.

  First: just when conscious creatures discover that the emergence of the self carries with it the fear of death, and then respond to this idea by discovering or inventing their gods, a remarkable thing happens. Not only are the gods obsessed over, and named, and prayed to, but miraculously—in response to these invocations, it would seem—the gods show up!

  The second thing is equally curious to relate. In purely physical terms, these magnificent beings often look a lot like the creatures who hoped for them, and prayed to them.

  Some take this likeness as a proof that the gods must be inventions, nothing but the offspring of a limited imagination. But others hold the opposite opinion: the similarity is proof that it was the gods who did the inventing. They made us! In His own image, as the book of Genesis has it, along with similar origin stories—as
common as the leaves on the trees—in our little galaxy alone.

  Two diametrically opposed possibilities, then: either we invented them, or they invented us.

  The third possibility, the truth, is rarely entertained.

  When newly self-conscious creatures first invoke their gods—frightened of what they are experiencing, and begging to be saved from the onrushing disaster of death—the response varies, but not by much. Sometimes the gods say, “Oh sure, no problem, be our guests and come this way.” But more often, as in the human case, they demur. “Not yet,” they say. “You’re not ready yet, not worthy of being saved, just yet. In time you will become so. Focus. Meditate on what is truly important. Try harder.” And then they disappear from the scene, as mysteriously as they came, leaving behind them not only the original fear but an ache, a hope, a fierce and desperate longing.

  These visitations have their intended effect: they wind civilization up, like an old-fashioned clock, and set it ticking. They are the origin of so much that animals do without, including priests and kings, laws and religion, hierarchies and myths, hopes and dreams. In short, they are the origin of societies that are driven for the first time not by mere bodily hunger but by the motivating thrill of higher purpose.

  Route One, old version: “If we can be good enough, if we can be worthy enough, then our souls will leave our bodies, and there will be no death, because we will live forever with the gods in Elysium / Aaru / Asgard / Vaikuntha / Gan Eden / Wora’ji’yaga / Heaven.”